Ann Agee at Arena - Brooklyn, New York - Review of Exhibitions

At the Kohler factory in Sheboygan, Wis., 25 employees are immortalized in bust-length ceramic-tile portraits set into a 21-by-10-foot blue-and-white ceramic wall. Ann Agee made the mural during her two-year "arts/industry" residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. Her recent Arena show consisted of miscellaneous porcelain works, portrait platters embellished with images of factory employees, and tile murals of suburban Wisconsin landscapes. Agee personalized Sheboygan's most anonymous features in a dense compilation of decorative elements inset with pictures.

The portrait platters include the names of sitters emblazoned in banderoles and their stories neatly printed in narrow stripes and ribbons around the rims. "Mike's into mud racing. He has lots of trophies. Racing starts in April or May depending on the mud. Varoom," reads one narrative. Mike Frombach's bust is at the center, and in medallions around the rim are emblems from his life: big-wheel vehicles, the Kohler molding machine at which he works, an image of Princess Di that refers to a practical joke he played on a friend. Linda Gensch and her dogs, Dan Kugel and his cows, Jaimy Burt's family and a heart inscribed "Marlene"--the representations are clunky, down to the rough, crowded decoration.

These are fancy platters, the sort that might be displayed on a plate rail in a modest home, perhaps the home of the very person represented. Agee has a light touch with narrative, and maybe a trace of condescending, big-town artist hanging out with the proles. Her humor is engaging, her labor intensive, her project an offbeat tribute not only to the locals but to the entire history of a craft whose makers mostly disappear into anonymity. However, anonymity is not the lot of these makers of porcelain bathroom fixtures, who helped Agee produce the elaborate "Delftware" Lake Michigan Bathroom seen last year in the New Museum's "Bad Girls" show. In that work, with its sink, toilet, bidet, urinal and tiled wall, the decorative is joined with diagrams, details of naked bodies, images of sewage treatment plants: the whole truth of bathrooms.

In murals at Arena, Agee showed placid and uninhabited scenes of distant Penney's and Firestone stores entombed in sterile parking lots. There are cars, but no people--perhaps an allusion to the chancy state of the midwestern U.S. economy, or at least to the curiously empty feel of big malls. Framing the scenes are, again, lush decorative motifs such as scrolls and acanthus, as if to assert that something can flourish in such arid surroundings no matter what. In this work, Agee maintains that an artist can play a role in recognizing richness even in suburbia and the factory.

COPYRIGHT 1995 Brant Publications, Inc.
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